There is a site called Feed Compare that allows you to view the RSS subscriber data for up to 4 feeds on a single graph. This means you could compare your competitors RSS subscriber count with your own feed.

To allow you to get a better idea of subscriber numbers you can also view a graph showing data for the last month, quarter, half year, year or 2 years assuming the feed has been in existence for that long.

The reason this is such a great tool is that you can now find out exactly how a sites RSS feed has grown over time. All you need is the sites Feedburner URL which you can get by right clicking on the sites RSS feed icon and copying the URL than pasting it into Feed Compare.

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There are already several options for RSS advertising but Bidvertiser has decided to enter the market and offer publishers the opportunity to sell advertising in their RSS feeds. Of course this also means advertisers will also be able to buy ads in RSS feeds.

Advertising with RSS

With the much larger subscriber numbers for RSS feeds it has become more viable for advertising to appear within an RSS feed. An ad in an RSS feed means that the ad will only appear in the feed rather than on the site.

As RSS subscribers tend to be more interested in the content the ads could be more effective if targeted correctly. Bidvertisers feed advertising program is in public beta and offers RSS advertising and allows RSS publishers to sell RSS ads. It will be interesting to see how it progresses compared the Feedvertiser program.

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I have been doing some digging into the statistics for Newsniche to try and discover what you are really interested in when it comes to RSS. So I have come up with the imaginatively titled 3 things you really want to know about RSS. So here are the most wanted to know things about RSS in reverse order.

RSS publishing tools

The third most popular topic is on RSS publishing tools. Rather than an article this is a section of the site dedicated to letting you know how you can publish RSS on your site. Being able to publish RSS on your site means that you have a constant stream of updating content for your readers.

Which is the best RSS feed reader

The second most popular item on the site is an article on Which is the best RSS feed reader. You certainly want to know which is the best way to read your feeds. This is not surprising as RSS is all about being able to have information from your favourite sites available to you without having to visit every you like frequently. Why not subscribe to their feed and have the content come to you.

Using Javascript to display RSS

I guess deep down everyone wants to display RSS using Javascript as the number one most read article is Using Javascript to display RSS. This is an article I wrote ages ago showing you how you could easily place content from an RSS feed on your site using a snippet of Javascript. That is so 2006.

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Are you checking your own RSS feeds, are you subscribed to your own feeds. If not then how do you know your feed is working properly. This is something I have come across, I have noticed on both my own and other bloggers feeds that sometimes your feed breaks.

The simplest thing you can do is subscribe to your feed in your feed reader. Create a separate folder to accommodate just your own feeds so you know exactly where they are. Now every time you make a post your new post will appear in your feed reader.

When you do your usual daily RSS trawl you will be reminded to check your feed. If there is anything amiss you will know about it sooner rather than later. I have emailed many a webmaster to tell them that their feed is broken. I mean who reads their own feeds, right.

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There is a new site that is selling RSS subscribers. The idea behind this is that the more subscribers you have the more valuable your site will be. This is based on RSS being the new metric for measuring a site based on Mark's theory that an RSS subscriber is worth 30 dollars.

RSS for sale

I think this is boarding on criminal, it basically promotes the faking of RSS subscribers to fool readers into thinking a blog is popular. It is lying to advertisers by artificially inflating the RSS subscriber count but worst of all the site seems to be selling RSS subscribers so the site or blog owner can sell their site at a premium. This is fraud.

Remember these are fake RSS readers they are selling. All that happens is that your FeedBurner counter reports more subscribers. As FeedBurner is owned by Google I am sure RSSxplosion will not last long.

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Collin LaHay has come up with an idea called RSSHugger, it's a site that allows webmasters to promote their RSS feeds by adding them to the site. You can add your own page but it will cost you 20US dollars (10 is you blog about RSSHugger).

RSS Hugger seems to be a cross between an RSS directory and a wiki. Collin wants the directory to grow to 50,000 blogs which he claims is 0.00045 percent of the blogosphere.

The idea behind the new site is to create buzz and generate new RSS subscribers for RSS feeds that are added to the site. When you buy a page you basically get your feed headlines displayed on your own page within RSSHugger. Whether or not enough buzz is created to generate any new subscribers to members feeds remains to be seen.

This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.

You may have noticed on Saturday (3rd November) that you FeedBurner feed counter was reporting a much lower level of subscribers to your blog. Here at Newsniche the counter dropped by nearly a hundred subscribers.

FeedBurner blame Google for the glitch as the Google feedfetcher bot had gone out on Friday night and was up late Saturday. This was probably due to drinking too much GoogleJuice the night before, those bots can't hold their drink. As a result none of the Google Reader subscribers were reported in the stats for Saturday.

Google Feedfetcher drops ball

At the time like me you may have worried even panicked when you saw a massive drop in subscriber numbers. If you have more than one blog then you would have figured out the drop was across the board and due to some glitch.

These sorts of glitches although usually temporary can cause a webmaster a lot of unnecessary stress. These things happen, my advice is don't hit the panic button, do a little investigating then report it if needed. More often than not these things are temporary. I have learned by experience if you do too much tinkering thinking it's something you have done you end up making things worse. All you need to do now is explain to your advertisers why your stats dropped.

This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.

Have you ever wondered how much each subscriber to your RSS feed is worth. Well according to Mark over at 45n5 that magic number is currently $30. Mark arrived at this figure by dividing the price blogs have recently sold for by the number of subscribers to the blog.

I have previously made predictions about RSS playing a more important role back in October 2006. It looks like RSS is now an important metric to measure the success of a site and it is also starting to play a larger role in deciding the monetary value of a blog.

RSS subscribers and their value

Although Mark's use of RSS as a measurement of value was just a bit of fun it does show that RSS is a valued metric. A year ago most webmasters and readers would not have placed much if any value in the number of subscribers you have.

As RSS becomes a more valued metric the value of the RSS feed itself will grow. There are going to be more advertisers willing to buy advertising in an RSS feed and the value of RSS will grow. This is because many RSS subscribers do not click through to the website itself but use the feed to consume the content.

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RSS is now one of the most valuable metrics on the net. Increasing your RSS subscriber count is a measurable way to show the popularity of your site. As RSS is an opt in way for readers to view your site contents, they can easily stop being a subscriber at any time.

It shows how far RSS has come when John Chow and Shoemoney start a competition to see who can get the most new subscribers in a month. Notice how it wasn't a competition to get the most traffic or the most subscribers to an email list but who can get the most RSS subscribers.

Why RSS subscribers

John and Shoe are both canny marketers and know the value of RSS. RSS is a transparent metric that shows a loyal readership. If a site starts to slide in it's content then readers will no longer subscribe. They would rather gain an RSS subscriber than an extra visitor.

Whilst the challenge is a bit of fun there is also a serious reason John and Shoe have gotten together to run this little competition. At the end of the competition they will both have a larger loyal subscriber base. This competition has gained them a large number of new subscribers which generally means more revenue for them.

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You've all seen the little FeedBurner subscriber counters on sites that display a site or more often a blogs number of RSS subscribers. Whilst this is a nice widget to display on your site there isn't much in the way of customizing to display something different.

Plaint text subscriber count

There is a way to display the number of readers you have for your feed by using FeedBurners API. This means you can display your subscriber count within some text, for example as part of a blog post. You could also have a separate message somewhere on you site saying X number of readers subscribe to this site.

You can use the PHP code below. You need to have PHP5 otherwise the SimpleXMLElement command will not work.